A blog full of bits of historical information, comments & observations, photographs (old and new), oddball ramblings and other totally random stuff.

Friday, October 3, 2014

CRUSHERS...

While flipping pages in my grandfather’s
photograph album, I noticed a repeating theme...in six or seven photos, all
taken around 1910 or so, the boys had the same kind of hat...and they all wore
them with the front brim turned up.

They called them “crushers,”
and they were all the rage back then. Men and boys wore them for all kinds of
activities, from work to play to fishing to sports...

The first photo I found was of my
grandfather, Gardner S. Gould, wearing his crusher. He’s got his work pants,
belt, white shirt (rolled sleeves), a necktie and his crusher; he was a civil
engineer and worked outside most of the time. I remember him looking like this
– he was a “putterer,” and used to do small projects around the house on
weekends.

These two guys are on a camping trip. I
cropped the two of them out of a photo that was framed in a leaf cut-out (the
photo was slipped behind the die-cut leaf and then the whole business pasted
into the album). The one on the right is my great-uncle Allen, but I haven’t
any idea who the one on the left is...

And then there’s another Gould boy (I think
it’s Howard), sporting his crusher while sailing on the family boat in East Boothbay. It seems odd to see him in a necktie while
doing something as casual as sailing, but that’s how it was back then...

So, I thought, did they all wear just
crushers? Or were there other styles popular back then?

I jumped back into my old
catalogues, and found some really amazing hats, some of them crushers.

I found a “fur crusher” hat
(which hasn’t a single strand of fur anyplace as far as I can see); a finer
grade crusher with a narrow silk ribbon band and a “medium curl” in the brim.

You're exactly right, Alex! I didn't make that connection, but I also remember Gilligan in one...or was it a sailor hat with the brim pulled down? The famous LLBean store in Maine still makes crushers -- felt ones. They're great fun!

I always learn something new on Sepia Saturday posts. I thought Crusher was a cartoon character! Mind you, we are watching ‘Peaky Blinders’ on TV, about a post-WW1 gang who used to hide razor blades in the peaks of their caps!

At last!

In the early 1800s, five families settle on the Eastern River in Pittston, Maine. Together, they build a strong and lasting agricultural neighborhood based on New England values of community and reciprocity. Both fiction and social history, The Eastern flows through the experiences and truths we share with those who have lived before us.